I really fooled him. Choosing the true-disciple transmission of Shape-Stealing Skin-Painting back then and cultivating it to Thorough Mastery was worth it-I truly made it my own!
Even among true-disciple transmissions, progress differed according to how far an individual had cultivated and mastered them.
Broadly speaking, there were five stages: initiation, command, proficiency, great completion, and perfection. Li Chen's attainment in Shape-Stealing Skin-Painting could now be described as complete command; he had already reached thorough mastery.
With such attainment in Shape-Stealing Skin-Painting, briefly deceiving an ordinary cultivator was not difficult. With careful preparation, maintaining a disguise for a long time was not impossible either.
At this level, the imitation no longer stopped at outward appearances. It also replicated one's aura and bearing, making the real and the false indistinguishable at first glance.
This was a genuine divine ability, not some ordinary disguise.
Li Chen could not imagine what proficiency, great completion, or perfection would look like. But according to his earlier reflections, if he could deceive everyone after assuming another identity, he could almost completely replace that person and inherit their karmic ties.
In other words, even the Great Dao of heaven and earth would have to be deceived.
Perhaps this was the chief reason the Creation-Promotion Secret Art contained this true-disciple transmission.
It needed this technique to acquire the identity of a "living being"!
When mortals believed a puppet was alive, cultivators believed it was alive, its creator and the puppet itself believed it was alive, and even the perception of the Great Dao of heaven and earth had been overturned, how would it differ from a truly living person?
This was a secret art of perception that touched upon philosophical reasoning, not something as simple as putting on an outer skin.
Another aspect was that people often used